How to implement autocomplete on a massive dataset

Question

I\'m trying to implement something like Google suggest on a website I am building and am curious how to go about doing in on a very large dataset. Sure if you\'ve got 1000 items

Answer 1

if you don't want a trie and you want stuff from the middle of the string, you generally want to run some sort of edit distance function (levenshtein distance) which will give you a number indicating how well 2 strings match up. it's not a particularly efficient algorithm, but it doesn't matter too much for things like words, as they're relatively short. if you're running comparisons on like, 8000 character strings it'll probably take a few seconds. i know most languages have an implementation, or you can find code/pseudocode for it pretty easily on the internet.